The Devil’s Pleasure Palace and How America Fell Victim to Marxist Progressive Ideas
As former President Barack Obama promised, America has certainly “fundamentally transformed” over the past several years–to the point that many of us can barely recognize the shining city on the hill that we once knew and loved.
The United States was a strong and flourishing nation, her culture was unapologetically Judeo-Christian, and despite her flaws, she was the freest, most magnificent country on earth.
It’s no coincidence that people flocked here from all over the world– the liberty and opportunity that America freely offered, was unbeatable.
However, ever since the 1960’s, this all slowly began to change, along with a fundamental reordering of Western cultural, morality, and law.
In addition, there was an ever-growing contempt for Christianity, the very faith (along with Judaism) that had for centuries, provided the essential moral foundation for America and Western Civilization. And now, here we are, finding ourselves at war with our own core founding values.
How did this all happen?
When we search for answers, we will discover a long-term infiltration and subversion of Judeo-Christian America by people holding a profoundly un-Christian and un-American worldview. We will discover the real history of the “progressive” movement and how it has been taking over virtually every one of America’s key institutions for the last two to three generations.
While the progressive tree has many Marxist roots in America, one of the most important to examine is the Frankfurt School. This influential group of Marxist academics, who back in the 1930’s during Hitler ascendency, moved from Germany to America to organize the nonviolent overthrow of America–first her culture, and later her government.
As David Kupelian explains in his book, The Snapping of the American Mind:
“Marxists today embrace an entirely new view of Marxism–hence the terms “neo–Marxism” and “cultural Marxism”–while the core principles remain the same: the acquisition and radical redistribution of wealth and power (and on a deeper level, a radical rebellion against God, in order to play god).”
And this new Marxism was injected into the cultural bloodstream of America’s baby boomers.
Military historian William S. Lind, in his essay, “Who Stole Our Culture?” cited Frankfurt School’s Herbert Marcuse (dubbed the “father of the New Left”) when he wrote about the pivotal decade of the 1960’s:
“The student rebellion of the 1960’s, driven largely by opposition to the draft for the Vietnam War, gave Marcuse a historic opportunity. As perhaps its most famous “guru,” he injected the Frankfurt School’s cultural Marxism into the baby boom generation. Of course, they did not understand what it really was…Marcuse and the few other people “in the know” did not advertise that political correctness and multiculturalism were a form of Marxism. But the effect was devastating: A whole generation of Americans, especially the university-educated elite, absorbed cultural Marxism as their own, accepting a poisonous ideology that sought to destroy America’s traditional culture and Christian faith. That generation, which runs every elite institution in America, now wages ceaseless war on all traditional beliefs and institutions. They have largely won that war. Most of America’s traditional culture lies in ruins.”
As we have discovered, the Frankfurt School’s “long march through the institutions”–a takeover through gradual evolution, rather than violent revolution–was the only way to introduce Marxism into America.
In the video below, best-selling author, journalist, screenwriter, renown critic and PJ Media contributor Michael Walsh also discusses his new book “The Devil’s Pleasure Palace” and how America has fallen victim to Marxist Progressive ideas:
As Michael Walsh explains:
“The Frankfurt school was a group of German philosophers who fell afoul with the Nazis and they fled to the United States. They found a new home at Columbia University in Manhattan. But they were cultural Marxists, very dedicated Marxists and also very dedicated to the destruction of Western Civilization as we know it.
So, what they decided to do was launch a multi-prong attack on things like the family, faith, language, political correctness comes out of this, all these buzzwords like “diversity” and “tolerance.” They used that as tools to get at the larger society and and they have been extremely successful. The most famous of their disciples is Saul Alinsky of course, who begat Hillary Clinton who begat Barack Obama. When you want to know how we got here, go back to these guys. We are living with the consequences of German left-wing cultural Marxism that got transplanted to the United States.
The key was that they did it through the universities. The famous “long march through institutions,” they invented that. So, in college in the 1960’s, you began to hear about Herbert Marcuse, Theodor W. Adorno, and all these philosophers. And their thoughts got into the bloodstream and now we live with it everyday. Everything we discuss now in the political context is basically this cultural Marxist framework. We’ve adopted their own terms for the debate. That’s why we lose.”
To combat the Marxism at our universities, Walsh also explains how we need to replace these ‘eternal’ Marxist professors with the old culture. He explains, “We need to be grounded again in the cultural varieties that have been assaulted by (Marxist) Critical Theory. Critical Theory says, “Let’s tear everything down.” Walsh also explains how “we live in an insane time now and that it’s going to burn itself down, we’ve got to start all over again.”
Ancient Chinese general Sun Tsu famously observed, “If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles.” But America’s enemies, for the past several generations, have specialized in two big things:
1.Deceiving us about who and what they really are
2.Confusing us as to who we really are and what we really stand for
–that being the primary purpose of the left’s subversion of our education system, entertainment, and the mainstream media.
As Kupelian describes:
“It’s fair to say, after two or three generations of secular leftist worldview being constantly implanted and reinforced throughout every level of our society, that tens of millions of us are just profoundly confused, conflicted, and corrupted. Worse, many of us, having been tricked into rebelling against our own values, now defend our confusion and corruption as though it were our God-given mission.
Thus are we confronted with the current civil war between two Americas. On one side we have those who basically still reverence God, common sense, reason, morality, natural law, and the laws of economics and of human nature–in general, the proven principles of Western civilization. On the other side are people who are confused, intimidated, or brainwashed–or else so covetous of power that they’ve abandoned all principle for the sake of power.”
The singular but very real blessing in all this madness is that suffering causes people to finally wake up. And once we’re awake and paying attention, we have a fighting chance, with God’s help, of redeeming ourselves and our nation.
So, what we must do is exactly what the Frankfurt School did–except do it in the opposite direction.
They took us away from reason only to wallow in emotional chaos. They drove us away from responsibility, morality and reverence for life and for the Creator of life. Therefore, we need to drive back toward our nation’s fundamentals, our core values. And we need begin by embarking on a long march back thorough our institutions now that we know the truth.
We not only need to take back our government, we also need to reclaim every one of our institutions that was stolen from us by the progressive movement. It certainly won’t be easy. But as long as we have our eyes wide open and we are paying attention, we can shine the light on the darkness to win the war.
